"I'm Trying to Reach Out, I'm Trying to Find My People": A Mixed-Methods Investigation of the Link Between Sensory Differences, Loneliness, and Mental Health in Autistic and Nonautistic Adults

Background

Rates of loneliness are substantially higher among autistic compared with nonautistic individuals. This observation refutes the persistent stereotype that autistic individuals are not motivated to seek meaningful social relationships. More plausibly, social environments systematically exclude people with higher levels of sensory differences, impeding on opportunities for autistic individuals to form meaningful relationships. In this study, we sought to quantify the level of distress associated with loneliness (Study A) and provide complementary qualitative insight into experiences of loneliness in relationship to sensory differences in autistic adults (Study B).

Methods

In Study A, N = 209 participants completed a range of self-report questionnaires. In Study B, nine autistic adults took part in 10-minute unstructured dyadic conversations around the topic of loneliness. We derived a qualitative understanding of autistic individuals' experience of loneliness, enriched by inductive and deductive analyses.

Results

In Study A, the autistic group showed significantly higher levels of loneliness, loneliness distress, anxiety, depression, and sensory reactivity. We found significant positive correlations between variables, but no group differences in differential relationships. The effect of sensory reactivity on anxiety and depression was mediated by levels of loneliness in both groups. In Study B, autistic participants described the pain of feeling lonely and socially disconnected, while simultaneously experiencing a need for restorative solitude after social overstimulation.

Discussion

Our results indicate that sensory differences are related with higher loneliness and associated poor mental health in both autistic and nonautistic adults. This effect was exacerbated in autistic adults due to higher levels of sensory reactivity. First-hand reports from autistic adults on intense loneliness and the obstructive role of sensory environments refute stereotypes about a lack of social motivation in autistic adults. We conclude that to enable meaningful and inclusive social interaction, a societal effort is needed to create spaces that consider the sensory needs of all neurotypes.

'Building our own house' as an insider-only Community-Partnered Participatory Research Council: Co-creating a safe space for Autistic knowledge production

LAY ABSTRACT

In recent years, there has been a growing call for participatory Autism research (i.e. research that meaningfully involves Autistic people in its design and delivery). Community Partnered Participatory Research is a research methodology that aims to share power between researchers and members of the researched community. There is some precedent for Community Partnered Participatory Research in Autism research, but it is still quite uncommon. At the start of our new research study (called Autism: From Menstruation to Menopause), we created a community council. For the first six meetings, our council was made up of four Autistic community members who were experienced in Autism advocacy and activism and three Autistic researchers. We seven are the authors of this article. In these first six meetings, we made plans for recruiting a larger number of lay community members who would join us later for the rest of the project (8 years in total). In this article, we describe and reflect what it felt like during these first six meetings to be part of a community research council where everybody is Autistic. We discuss how we co-created a safe space, how we helped each other feel valued and how we worked together to support each other's sometimes-differing access needs so that everyone could fully participate. We provide recommendations for how to support Autistic people to lead research on their own terms with their unique insights.

Mutual (Mis)understanding: Reframing Autistic Pragmatic "Impairments" Using Relevance Theory

A central diagnostic and anecdotal feature of autism is difficulty with social communication. We take the position that communication is a two-way, intersubjective phenomenon-as described by the double empathy problem-and offer up relevance theory (a cognitive account of utterance interpretation) as a means of explaining such communication difficulties. Based on a set of proposed heuristics for successful and rapid interpretation of intended meaning, relevance theory positions communication as contingent on shared-and, importantly, mutually recognized-"relevance." Given that autistic and non-autistic people may have sometimes markedly different embodied experiences of the world, we argue that what is most salient to each interlocutor may be mismatched. Relevance theory would predict that where this salient information is not (mutually) recognized or adjusted for, mutual understanding may be more effortful to achieve. This paper presents the findings from a small-scale, linguistic ethnographic study of autistic communication featuring eight core autistic participants. Each core autistic participant engaged in three naturalistic conversations around the topic of loneliness with: (1) a familiar, chosen conversation partner; (2) a non-autistic stranger and (3) an autistic stranger. Relevance theory is utilized as a frame for the linguistic analysis of the interactions. Mutual understanding was unexpectedly high across all types of conversation pairings. In conversations involving two autistic participants, flow, rapport and intersubjective attunement were significantly increased and in three instances, autistic interlocutors appeared to experience improvements in their individual communicative competence contrasted with their other conversations. The findings have the potential to guide future thinking about how, in practical terms, communication between autistic and non-autistic people in both personal and public settings might be improved.